You should certainly (my, that sounds bombastic. IMO) be angry at her, then -- she had the resources to get you away from that horror of a stepfather and didn't. But I don't think that necessarily means you have to be angry at her, now, still. It's a long time ago and she sounds very different.
she really is a very trustworthy, loving person, with whom I happily entrust my children. she's a different person now, really.
Yes she knew he was sexually abusing me (infrequently and not terribly as that kind of thing goes) later, like when I was 15 (why I think this is so OK I don't know, maybe John Derbyshire has the answer).
If you look for ways it could have been worse, you will find them. Doesn't mean this was OK in any way.
I mean, you know what else would have been worse? The holocaust. Or being sold into a sweatshop for a life of abuse. But at some point you just have to accept that in a world where horrible things are permitted to happen, we can judge the actions of individuals toward individuals anyway.
At the first percentile, the differences between you and the half percentile may seem huge, and normal may seem so far away, but dammit the fact that you were really unlucky doesn't mean you're undeserving of happiness.
You know what's funny? That all this talk about needing to be reminded what's really OK and what's truly not, reminded me of my work.
I don't deal with things that are screwed up in a human way, but when you learn to work in a system that's really dysfunctional, sometimes you have to step back and remember, no, there's not really a good reason for it to work this way, people are just too bad (mostly lazy or venal) to fix it.
Until someone does.
That's fucked up, alameida, for the record.
Speaking for myself, I've been coming at things lately from the perspective of treating myself the way I'd treat my child. If Mara's mad or crying or whatever I say, "It's okay to cry if you need to cry. It's okay to feel angry if you're angry." Typically either means she's grieving her birth family and she does have periodic anger at them even as a three-year-old. So when I'm frustrated and want to tell myself to shut the fuck up and stop complaining since it's my fault I'm in this mess, I intead try to tell myself that it's ay to feel frutrated and so on. I don't know what kind of phrases you use with your girls, but I know you love them and that you were undermothered as a child. If treating yourself or your memory of your younger self the way you'd treat them helps, well, it works for me sometimes.
I say that my step-dad did love us, he was just a broken person. my business partner insists he didn't love us or he wouldn't have treated us like that. he saidhe loved us often enough. he seemed to mean it much of the time. maybe it's a distinction without a difference. I guess maybe he was just an evil person, it's not like I don't believe they exist. what am I saying, see? OBVIOUSLY he was an evil person. I'm not sure why I don't want this to be the case.
Your mother's been in recovery for a really long time then--sorry, I had the impression somehow that she had died--I think from when you referred to her late-stage alcoholism. She must be like a completely different person now.
That must make it harder to come to terms with the past, especially since you are so protective of everyone you love. But do you have to protect her from your anger? Maybe you can work out this stuff with your therapist, including acknowledging how betrayed you must have felt, without having to confront your present-day mother. Isn't one of the ideas of CBT that experiences and feelings that were unbearable to a child can be managed by an adult?
Personally, I'm a big fan of burying painful feelings, which kind of gets in the way in therapy, but...
Anyway, best wishes to you. I hope things get better soon.
I hug them and tell them they're safe, that mommy and daddy are just in the next room, that everything's going to be OK. that they need to think about right now, what's happening right now, how the lights look, how the sheets feel, everything now. nothing they're scared about is happening right now. I guess I could try that.
8: my mom's mother, my grandmother, died of late-stage alcoholism in 2000. it doesn't look like a good way to go, gotta say.
why I think this is so OK
I tend to frame things like this and I suspect it's a kind of effort to make things seem feasible to deal with along the lines of "there's possibly shit out there I couldn't handle but this is not one of those times".
At the risk of beong presumptious, I'm guessing there were things you did when you were using for which (while not nearly so horrific) you had to make amends, too. Recognizing that she is a very different person now, and forgiving her, and loving her completely does not mean that what happened was okay.
And, while I am being presumptuous, your fear of getting angry at her suggests the possibility that you are already/still angry with her at some level. Dealing with that must seem horribly scary, but it does not have to hurt the good relationship you've built. acknowledging it (to yourself -- who says you need to relive it with her?) could even make your relationship stronger. Keeping in mind that the mom you are angry with is a different person than the mom you have built a good relationship with now may help.
12 to 10. I'm not judging gswift's coping mechanism.
I think this gets to why you keep trying to let your step-dad off the hook. You're really trying to let your mom off the hook, because the alternative is that you'll be really angry with her for not protecting you.
I'm guessing there were things you did when you were using for which (while not nearly so horrific) you had to make amends, too. Recognizing that she is a very different person now, and forgiving her, and loving her completely does not mean that what happened was okay.
Di makes a good point.
Nothing wrong with hating the person she was or in loving the person she is now.
I am a fan of the poem The Guest House by Rumi. I appreciate how the poem portrays emotions coming in and out of yourself.
It is ok to be pissed off at your mother's horrible actions then. (She wasnt a passive bystander.) It is also ok to not grab hold on to the emotion and keep it with you. Bring it out. Feel it. Put it away.
I also recently read somthing by Thich Nhat Hanh where he was writing about the concept of active concentration. You are not concentrating on a particular thing (the fabulousness of your kids), but on every thing that comes into your brain.
I do not really know much about Buddhism or mindfulness, but these ideas are helpful to me in difficult times.
Also, your step-dad never changed like your mother. Maybe we all wish to believe that someone is not completely evil. That given the right circumstances, they will change and be a good person.
He never did. So you are left with him being evil. You are robbed of the opportunity to forgive him or to find out that he truely was evil through and through. I dont know much about psych but it seems like that is a base desire for all of us.
Maybe this is similar to kids who dont know one or both parents who think "My dad [or mom] would have loved me if they knew me or if they had the chance!"
We've got a transient downtown who's a big fan of pulling it out and feeling it but isn't so good at putting it away.
With the disclaimer that I'm an imaginary person on the Internet and have no idea what's best for you, I'd offer this: You're allowed to craft whatever narrative serves you best here.
You seem to be worried about truth and justice. You want to accurately understand the facts and judge those facts fairly, but in this case, neither truth nor justice offers any meaningful constraint on the story you're allowed to tell yourself.
You owe your mother nothing. You owe your stepdad less than nothing, especially since he's dead. Any notion of fairness regarding the two of them would involve outcomes significantly worse than anything you're contemplating.
The facts are likewise open to different reasonable interpretations. It's true, apparently, that your stepdad and mom were fucked up in ways that we can be sympathetic to. It's also true that they were moral agents who knew what was right and chose not to do it.
So in the end, you get to pick your story, and you should pick your story based on what works best for you. Justice and truth don't enter into it. If you decided to cut your mother off permanently, that would be fair and just and based in an obvious way on the facts you've presented here. If you decide she's a constructive influence in your life and the lives of your children, then that's cool too.
Any idea that you're not being fair to them is just a distraction. The question is: What narrative serves you best?
I am vastly out of my depth here, which is why I don't weigh in on these threads. alameida, you know way the hell more about alcoholism and recovery than I want to. But it seems to me (in my ignorance) that if you wanted to get some mad but not be all the way mad at your mom, alcohol gives you a different entity to get mad at. Could you be mad at booze for fucking up your mom, or mad at your alcoholic mom in the past without being mad at your recovered mom? Maybe those distinctions aren't enough to keep big emotions contained, or are contrary to your recovery methods (of which I don't know much).
I also loved Thorn's recommendation for nurturing yourself the way you'd nuture your daughters. Honestly, I think everyone should do that, unless they aren't kind enough to their daughters, in which case they should be gentler to themselves and their kids.
I would totally trust Thorn with my hypothetical children.
You are robbed of the opportunity to forgive him
For the record, after giving a summer's worth of reading and thought to the notion of forgiveness, in the end I decided not to forgive (something trivial by comparison). People looooooove to push forgiveness, but if you don't want to, I don't think you have to. Or that it should be the goal.
The best information I found on forgiveness was Worthington's textbook for psych students: Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Theory and Application. Still too pro-forgiveness for my tastes, but very useful in explaining when, why and how people forgive.
25:
I loved the book Amish Grace. My take-away was that forgiveness is a selfish concept.
You arent doing it for them. It is about you. Screw that person. They dont get to control you.
I find that helpful.
Since Will sends me that Rumi poem at least once a year when I'm freaking about something... Think of forgiveness as a mechanism for evicting particular feelings (anger, resentment, hatred) from your house when they've overstayed their welcome. It's not the only mechanism, of course. But it's a useful tool to have at hand.
gswift is on a roll this morning.
God I'm totally punchy this morning. I get up early as I'm in charge of breakfast and coffee so my wife and kids can get to school in a sane manner. The mornings where I've worked the night before and then come home and drank sauvignon and slept only like three hours make for some weird jokey moods before I crash back to bed.
But it seems to me (in my ignorance) that if you wanted to get some mad but not be all the way mad at your mom, alcohol gives you a different entity to get mad at. Could you be mad at booze for fucking up your mom, or mad at your alcoholic mom in the past without being mad at your recovered mom?
You can't outlogic your emotions. I hate to sound woo-woo, but the kid inside is hurt, and the adult Alameida needs to take care of the kid Alameida, and address those needs. Alameida's 2011 mother is somewhat irrelevant, unless Alameida wants to initiate those conversations with her.
Also 15 is right on.
yeah, fuck forgiving him. it's for my brother that I can't forgive. meh, I'm going to sleep. I started my lame oprah-esque workbook. I can do this with a time-limited goal after which I don't think about it anymore. 1 month, that's it. but if the drugs have stopped working unless I take more and more...I gotta try something. I really, really think getting good and low would fix (ha) my problems. I am aware it would actually make them worse. well, I'm not drinking or using, following the doctor's suggestions 85% of the time. this is all I got right here. part of me is scheming for sabotage because my life is too good. stupid brain.
*I*'m really angry at alameida's mom for not protecting her kids, not as though that's helpful or anything. If it is helpful, add my voice to the "that is fucked up shit and not okay at all" chorus.
Could you be mad at booze for fucking up your mom
I'M NOT MAD AT YOU I'M MAD AT THE BOOZE.
||
I apologize for threadjacking, but I need to vent, and I need a bit of a reality check.
I have a client who tried to jump out of a 3rd floor window about 8 years ago. I only found out about it now, because the client was served by a different agency then.
Anyway, this client had been treated with a super-effective antipsychotic and the psychosis had cleared. Faced with the reality of the illness and the state of her life, she couldn't bear to live.
So, a decision was made that because the risk of suicide was so great, they would take her off the medicine and treat her so that some of her psychosis remained. Because, you know, psychotherapists are hard to get in the state system.
That deserves a WTF, right? I mean, I guess that they were really afraid that she'd kill herself and there were not adequate resources, but that just seems terribly wrong to me.
|>
I don't even understand: is it that she can get different services if she's psychotic? So if she's well enough medicated to be non-psychotic, but still suicidal, then they have to let her go kill herself, but if they leave her psychotic, they can have her in inpatient care or something?
No, they could manage her in a group home, but they didn't feel that they had the resources in the community (as opposed to in a hospital) to treat the depression and keep her from killing herself. So they decided to let her live with some of her delusions of grandeur.
They put her back on a lower dose of the same med at different times and she's on it now doing well, but not at a fully therapeutic level. I'm really disturbed by this.
I'm confused. What do you think should be done?
So they decided to let her live with some of her delusions of grandeur.
When you put it that way, it sounds at once horrible and something that I wish somebody would do for me every now and then.
So, when she's psychotic she's not suicidal? Boy, that's a hard choice.
36: Let her make the decision herself. And in a just world give her therapy and support instead of letting her believe that she had babies in the walls.
Recently, she left at night, because she thought she was supposed to see her son, went missing fir 2 days and had a heart attack,
Yeah, forgiveness is bullshit. I say: hate forever! Some people really need to be hated forever and ever.
I wonder if hating him for your brother alone is another, more roundabout way of letting him off the hook? He abused your brother, you couldn't protect him, so at least you can explain it, right? You were too weak to protect him, so at least the world makes sense. What doesn't make sense is that your mother didn't protect you.
My brother and I had a certain amount of bad stuff happen to us as kids, and I used to think about things in terms of protecting my brother because it allowed me to distance myself from my own feelings.
Let her make the decision herself.
Is part of the problem that it can be hard to determine what that even means with mentally ill people?
well, I'm not drinking or using, following the doctor's suggestions 85% of the time.
I don't understand this sentence, but it worries me. Uh, not that there aren't other things that worry me in your recent posts, alameida.
7: whether or not your stepfather loved you didn't matter as long as he kept up his abuse. IIRC it's Avedon Carol who said that what most abused children want is not for their parents to go to jail but for the abuse to stop. Love is secondary to that. You neither need to forget nor forgive him, if you don't want to.
The point of forgiveness, I think, is about you, not some universal sense of justice. If forgiveness allows you to live a life more free of the harm someone inflicted on you, go for it; often it does, and often it's a better way of coming to peace with something that's happened to you, and living into a more loving life, than grudge holding. If not, not. If this helps, God handles both the general forgiveness and figuring out the universal scale of righteousness; you don't and can't and don't need to. Just do what helps you stay at peace and moving forward. I think pf's 21 is saying something similar.
Forgiving others for past actions, even things they did while addicted, is hard because they're recognizably the same people. For me compartmentalization works, partly because my past was not nearly as bad as Al's (which, not OK, by the way).
I have nothing specific to say about real damage or a parent with past failings of that magnitude. Be good to yourself seems like a helpful principle. Picking up on an earlier remark, I like Thich Nhat Hahn's book Anger, but I have enough remove from my problems that meditation and reason have some traction.
Part of my motivation for how I now relate to my folks is that I want my son to see positive parent-child relations between adults, since it's me or nothing. Maybe not helpful for Al; but for me, worrying about how my folks' defects might hypothetically have affected my kid is counterproductive. The past is gone.
t I want my son to see positive parent-child relations between adults, since it's me or nothing.
This is big, for me. I have some difficulties with my mother -- very small scale compared to what has gone on with Alameida and other people here. I'm now past the age at which she almost entirely cut off contact with her own mother, and a big part of what keeps me working on the relationship despite difficulties is hoping to model sticking around, so that I get to see my hypothetical future grandchildren.
The OP is horrible in a way familiar, distantly. I am impressed that you have any contact at all with your mother, which seems a pretty well-adjusted way to be at this stage. My childhood was nothing like that miserable, but it was unpleasant and memorable enough that I haven't spoken to one of my parents in close to two decades (considering how often I quote my father's mild-mannered wisdom, it ought to be easy to guess which), and if I had kids I'd swallow a block of plastic explosive before I let my mother or anybody from her wretchedly cruel, miserable, soul-sucking family near them.
42: Well, I mean, anyone with major depression is mentally ill. A lot of people with SMI consider self-determination to be incredibly important and object to being called "the mentally ill. I probably don't have much of a sense of humor about this, because she does dangerous things when she believes that God told her to do something.
I don't think anybody was trying to make a joke about it.
Yeah, I wasn't clear. I didn't mean to suggest that, only to say that I'm probably touchy about it.
"...often it's a better way of coming to peace with something that's happened to you..."
That's about the only reason to forgive, and I go with the financial model of forgiveness. I forgive in that I don't expect the other person to make it good, heal the hurt, undo the injury, whatever. That's doesn't mean I forget. Nor do I trust unless there's some evidence of a major change.
My take, for what it's worth and could well be nothing from thousands of miles away, is that Al's step-father was a monster and would have been one of those stereotypical murderous warlords in another time-line, he just never got the chance in this universe. Mom was a victim too, and anyway is no longer the same person if her brain is no longer marinated in drugs.
So. What to do? Find out what happened, learn some tricks for recognizing and aborting old destructive patterns whatever happened created, and go on with one's life. It really comes down to resolving to never let one's past win.
Let her make the decision herself.
Is part of the problem that it can be hard to determine what that even means with mentally ill people?
Is part of the problem that it can be hard to determine what that even means with mentally ill people?
BG, I want to applaud your dedication to using "was I" rather than "was me". Kudos.
Well, my question in 42 still stands. (And was not meant jokingly whatsoever.) Is she to make the decision while she's medicated and suicidal or unmedicated and delusional?
Oh, I see. I didn't understand that to be your question. I think they should have given her a space to talk about her feelings about her life.
She was still medicated with antipsychotics when she was psychotic which they used to calm her down. They were just much less effective. As a legal matter, she's not considered capable of making that decision, but I'm inclined to say that she ought to have had some say when she was more consistently lucid. It's not like she wasn't depressed at other times.
Nobody really asked at either time.
But out of curiosity, what would you say about which would be the state in which it would be her decision. And would it be better to put her in a hospital for a longer period of time and aggressively treat the depression/ existential despair or leave her in the community fairly psychotic. I can tell you which of those choices costs the state less.
Having no firsthand knowledge of this woman's case, I'm not sure I could begin to say. I don't have terribly much experience with serious mental health issues, but I have gotten the sense from experiences with a few close friends that it can be difficult to know when to let people make "their own" decisions. (And that's outside of situations where public services are involved, which of course makes it more complicated.)
||
My stats class has gotten so bad that a number of the students have gotten together and started a twitter feed, so they can liveblog (livetweet, if you must) the disaster that is every class session. The profile icon is a picture of the Hindenburg.
|>
59: I think that my frustration comes from the fact that they went with the cheap choice--- no therapy, no long-term hospital (since you can't bill the Feds for state mental hospitals.)
Comment 62 needs a better self-image. (Or maybe it should just smile more . . . )
60 sounds awesome, and would have been a good solution for my torts class last year.
I don't really have anything profound to say except to virtually give you my moral support and note that I've admired you and your writing and your style and your wit, albeit from afar, offline for 15+ years now and online for 6+ years and I think it's pretty incredible that you have done as much awesome stuff as you have done and been as nice a person as you seem to be despite such crummy things happening to you and despite being let down by your mother.
So I had a girlfriend whose first sexual experience was at age 11 or 12 with a 30-something year old man. He was the friend of her mothers boyfriend. The three adults got all fucked up and mom sent her upstairs with this third wheel so that mom and boyfriend could screw downstairs.
She told me it wasn't so bad though, because he only penetrated her with his fingers and had her get him off with hands and mouth. Apparently he was worried he'd hurt her as she was so little.
I told here it was ok to not be ok with this, but she had trouble coming around to that. Didn't help that she lived in the same situation still, and worried about her little sister & brother, and knew her mother loved her even so.
I don't think she wanted to open the door that came with getting mad about these things. I started to push her on it ... but then I realized maybe she knew better than I did.
Way more than half the people we knew were shit like this around with them.
This stuff is hard, alameida. I don't think there is a right way through it, just a way that's right for you.
They're still fast friends last I heard, by the way (the girl and her mom). Living much the same lives but I got leery of judging a long time ago.
Also, alameida, I hope posting stuff here helps you find your way. I feel like maybe I'm not being helpful. If you feel so too, tell me and I'll piss off.
"we knew were shit like this around with them."
Were carrying shit like this...
sigh.
||
Sifu, could you say something about the badness of your class, so that I don't worry that my class is worse?
|>
69: oh man, where to start. Well, first of all, there are three books, all of them optional. There are eight different places where course documents might be posted. Documents get posted with arbitrary, uninformative filenames, and without telling anybody that they're live. The instructor and the TA don't communicate, so labs will cover material that hasn't been covered in class. The previous homework, the instructor put up a dataset that we were to use that was totally unlabelled. If you managed to figure out that you were supposed to download a paper with an uninformative, seemingly entirely unrelated name from one of the eight different places on the website, you could potentially discover what the different variables corresponded to, except that they were added to the dataset in the wrong order. The homework format keeps changing from week to week and is endlessly mysterious. The instructor and TA will both refer back confidently to things that they mentioned briefly weeks ago. There is never any indication given that any piece of information is more important than any other. When you email them a question, they tell you to ask it on the forum. When you ask it on the forum, they don't answer it. They both have thick accents, which is fine, but more problematically neither of them knows the english words for many of the concepts they're discussing. They are bound and determined not to teach us any math (in a statistics class!) but keep referring to formulas that they had mentioned once previously (but not taught us) like we should know them. If you ask a question in class, they respond with what appears to be withering scorn. They didn't post a schedule until well after the beginning of the semester, and having posted it, they've immediately thrown it out. It still isn't at all clear how grading in the class works.
There's a lot more, but that hits some of the high points. Helpful?
And, I should say, this is a required first year graduate class, that nominally teaches material that will be very important for the academic career of every student in the room. Everybody in the class is extremely motivated to pay attention and do well, and everybody but me is a total academic overachiever. Nonetheless, everybody is completely mystified.
71 cont'd: even people (like me!) who already know much of the material.
Oh man, I so totally want to link to the twitter feed here.
Student: Why do we use the pairwise comparisons? C: Because I want to show you.
"why are we using hammert?" "Just like this, to show you"
"I am now going to talk about the thing that I am not going to talk about."
Anyhow, I hope I've made Labs feel less-bad.
70: Jeez! I had a few sort-of-bad classes but nothing like that! Get someone higher up to sit in and see what's going on, there's no reason for either individuals or organizations to be paying those clowns for that sort of "deliverable".
For some reason the department has never been able to find somebody competent to teach this class, although I think it might be worse than usual this year. We did have to fill out mid-course evaluations, which I think probably read as sort of a cry for help, and somebody's going to come talk to us (without the instructor present) about what we think is going on.
Holy crap I love this. I'm going to start using "Because I want to show you" all the time.
I always dreamed you would say "69 oh man, where to start" to me, but not exactly in this context. That's epic bad pedagogy.
"some of you will learn more in this course than others... i don't know why but you will"
bad karma, sifu, bad karma
awesome twits sounding like some koans or what, very fitting for you
70: wow. I think I'm going to save this comment in a file on my computer so I can refer to it every time I think some project of ours is going badly.
Christ, sounds like an Aristocrats class.
87: Yes, I hope you are doing cluster analysis.
Couple more:
that is a substantive question and I don't know
if it does make sense in your head, then it is a substantive issue
like a big kind of round thing is the full variance of your variable
You know who liked statistics?
Stalin.
"Substantive" was code for "I'm not going to answer that question", by the way.
That stats class actually sounds worse than some of the awful classes I've had in the past few years. Although currently there a class in [redacted] that is driving everyone crazy. Fortunately, after posting course-related content in 4 different places, they've settled on using just one as the primary source. Still, you really shouldn't have to read a 100+ comment thread on a wiki page just to decipher the instructions on the assignments.
I'm guessing "Your mother is a substantive issue" would probably be an unhelpful response to their response.
Because I want to show you YOUR MOTHER.
some of you will learn something, but not alas our sifu, i'm like so sooo pleased, good job, sifu's stats teachers!
93.last: Maybe that's the assignment! Geez, didn't you guys ever do those lateral thinking quizzes; they're just trying to get in your heads.
Student: Why do we use the pairwise comparisons? C: Because I want to show you my Pokemons.
"why are we using hammert?" "Just like this, to show you my Pokemons"
One of the stunning things about my course is that both instructors are native English speakers and yet one of them, despite speaking clearly enough that the lectures don't stand out as unclear or incomprehensible, writes pretty close to unintelligible stuff. On the course blog, in comment threads, on assignment sheets that emphasize the importance of clarity, as feedback sent to the whole class, pretty much anywhere that course-related writing can appear.
At first I thought it was just the result of rushing, but now I wonder. It's like random words, suffixes, prefixes, clauses just go missing from the sentences. And clarity and precision is a big part of the course. Part of an early lecture was about consistency of punctuation.
Because I want to show you YOUR MOTHER.
It does not make sense in your head. It is a Pokemons issue.
You can herd me any way you like.
That twitter feed really is pretty great. And has a familiar feel to it.
Hey Al, just wanted to send a couple of good vibes before I turn in for the night.
My stats class was the very worst class in my MSW program. I never write anything on evaluations because I think they're usually more about the student than the class, but I remember on that one sitting and writing for a while about the practice of making PhD students whose interest/aptitude was in research teach master's level students, and describing the professor's relationship to the class as "adversarial."
MSWs take a stats class? I did not know that.
Our instructor got hired to act as a statistical consultant for the department. This whole "teaching a graduate class" thing I think they kind of sprung on her unexpectedly. At least, I try to give her the benefit of the doubt that way.
I've never had a graduate class taught by anything but a tenured or tenure-track professor.
97: Read, don't you have a goat's or sheep's head you can kick around until it's bedtime? Go outside and play, the grownups want to talk about grownup things.
107: I have no idea if this is universal. I think my program gave more weight to the administrative side than some. The one of our orientation speakers who did not go on to become the current president told us that some large percentage of us would be in administration within five years, and the word "administration" is in the name of the school, so I guess they assume there's a good chance you'll be doing program evaluation.
Alanically, administration has been somewhat resistant to my efforts to get into it.
Have you tried getting the administration drunk?
See I almost made that joke, but I didn't.
And that's why Moby makes the big bucks/is taking a stats class that isn't terrible.
I'm excited: we've heard from read, Emerson, Tia, FL, and Mr./Ms. Bridgeplate (and probably some other old characters I've forgotten). Truly it is a time of great hope for the return of the Occluded Ogged.
We just covered exact logistic regression and I understood it exactly.
My because I want to show you, let me show you it.
In my previous program, academic rules prohibited grad students from taking classes (for credit) from anyone not tenured/tenure-track, although there were some workarounds where you attend a course as "independent study" and but all of your work to turn in would be set and graded by a TT prof. The rules might have been different for MA students.
Here, I've probably had about a 60/40 or even 50/50 split between tenured/TT and adjuncts. Some of the best, and worst, courses have been from adjuncts.
107: Way back when, psychology undergrads had to take a statistics course no matter what, and the grad students had to take a more advanced one.
That many of them were totally uninterested in anything but clinical therapy was irrelevant, the thought was they needed those courses to be able to understand many of the published papers.
I would estimate that 100% of those students, once in practice, skipped to the conclusions section immediately after reading the introduction of any paper of interest.
119.last: I don't even read the introduction.
because I'm raaacist, let me tell you a funny story that happened in afghanistan recently. a local leader who was working as a project supervisor for local aid development (water supply, not sure what part exactly), got mad at a laborer who was slacking off. so he knocked him down, beheaded him with a shovel, and kicked the head a good long ways, a la soccer ball, into the canal (counterproductive, I can't help feel, water sanitation-wise, but perhaps it's neither here nor there.)
the well-meaning expat running the project (not my friend but an actual well-meaning etc) was directed by higher-ups in the company to "counsel" him on why beheading people isn't cool, and how to use other motivational tools than "I will kill you rrrhhaagggg!!" counsel. I can't help but imagine a pretty funny conversation there, via interpreter: "we can send them into the 'time out' corner of the construction area." "rrrttgaahhah will kill you!!!!" "OK. what if we dock his pay?" [noms on chair with fanglike teeth and decapitates plant in office.]
so I ask, why didn't the family of the beheaded guy come demand justice? well, the man got the supervisor job because he's an important tribal leader and there's also a blood feud, so it was fine. me: well-- [interrupted] anyway he's a talib, they're all afraid of him. me: ??!! but then why is he...how are you supposed to...? [redacted.] having seen a photo, I can say that the gentleman in question has wild eyebrows which would be the envy of even the oldest, slackest tenured professor in all the world, but are still jet black. why are we using the shovel? because I want to show you.
119 is remarkable for how similar and yet diametrically opposed it is to my situation. The more things change, the more roles get reversed confusingly?
48: flippanter: just wanted to say I'm sorry your mom was horrible to you. whatever is the shittiest thing that ever happened in your life is the shittiest thing, and there's really no point comparing them for awfulness. [n.b. this is true when I give other people advice but false in my own case because...we...I'll get back to you on that later]. making hilarious sarcastic jokes about how awful everything is all the time does not mitigate the awfulness, even if it encourages alcoholism dry wit in later life.
Maybe he uses "Just for Men" on his eyebrows? I know I do.
122 to 121. BUT WHO DID TWEETY BEHEAD?
Also, surely the main conclusion we can draw from 121 is "What the fuck are we doing in Afghanistan?"
124: Only his browdresser knows for sure.
123: Agreed. Playing the "My trauma was more traumatic than your trauma" game is really just self-pitying bullshit. A quick and easy antidote is googling up a few articles and pictures about kids undergoing therapy after a close encounter with high explosives.
BUT WHO DID TWEETY BEHEAD?
bob, of course.
YOU MEAN "WHOM," SURELY??!!
It's important to googleproof WOFLSON.
128: instead that just makes me feel guilty about feeling bad at all since honestly, it wasn't the worst thing ever, etc. etc. but benquo is also right in 3.
133: why the hell does it have to be "the worst thing ever" to be taken seriously and dealt with effectively? We don't do that with physical illnesses or injuries, generally we don't do that with cars or computers acting up, we don't do that with fires in the kitchen, we don't do that with warning lights in airplane cockpits, ad nauseam.
What looking at "worse" should do is affirm to you that getting through whatever is possible 'cause others, plain old common others, have done so. They are made of the same old stuff as the rest of us, it's not magic, it's not special, it's just hard work and the will to do it.
gah, I know, I am just incapable of applying rational insight to the situation. it's clearly not the case that primo levi is the only person who has ever suffered anything worth talking about or doing anything about in all of human history. I "know" all sorts of things but I don't feel them. I "knew" it was a bad idea to do heroin every day; it's not like I'm some kind of total idiot. I just went and did it anyway because, fuck it.
the part of me that's still obeying the (quite rational to obey at the time!) demand to shut the fuck up is conspiring with the part that wants to kill me, and together they say: christ it wasn't that bad, its not like you were being raped all the time, there were probably other children on your same street with worse shit happening right there, why don't you fucking nut up and get over it, it's been 20 fucking years and you're still whining about this like a little bitch...ad nauseam.
I can't make them shut up because I don't have control of that lever. I have control of the rational part, and the ability to take enough valium to turn the gain down on the stereo, but that's it. the other lever--I don't even know where that shit is. it's not repressed, clearly, it's prancing around making trouble, right? my oprah workbook is going to fix this? what are the fucking odds? but then I'm using that as an excuse not to do it, right? all this backlash is probably a sign it does have a chance of working, actually, or what would it be so scared of? the "I want to kill you" part, I mean. writing this comment is giving me a stomachache. I'm going to go work on my tan.
and by following the doctor's instructions 85% of the time I mean taking only 15 mg of valium rather than 20. or, worst case scenario, 30. I haven't been taking, like 100. when I was in rehab they gave me 30mg of valium and then cautioned I might have trouble walking on my own on a dose like that and should ring for help to use the toilet, and I just thought, bless your little hearts.
it's not magic, it's not special, it's just hard work and the will to do it.
ok, willingness to do work, I'll work on that. my mercenary friend says "I promise to try to try." he's not a font of good advice generally though.
Al, every time you think "it wasn't that bad", I'm going to administer electric shock with the power of my mind. Aversion therapy works. Psychic aversion therapy is less well-proven, but I'm sure the same general principles work.
I promise to try to try (to not kill you)
Must've been very reassuring.
115: The Skrull demographic has also recently weighed in, IIRC. It's a very exciting time.
alameda, you say about irrational and rational parts if you and having control over the rational part
i wonder whether you are religious, what if to fight the irrational thoughts it would help if you try to relay that part to prayers, i mean just try to trick your mind thinking this works or somehow helps? there are some tibetan buddhist maani - mantras that is believed to work that way, purify one's thoughts, ward off any evil
please don't think i try to convert you to any religion, just thought if it could provide some relief maybe it is worth a try
little children when they got scared of something they seem to get calmed down by those mantras, it's a very common custom in my culture to bring the scared child to the temple and let a monk read a prayer to the child and believe it
worked to ward off the scare, i half believe, half doubt, and
it really seems sometimes those prayers work
i mean what would a little child would know about religion,prayers right? but here it is uncalm, crying, not sleeping, and after the prayers seem calmed and usual self
the scares could be anything, a dog, a car, a movie on tv, but usually people believe it's people's 'tsagaan xar xel am' which is gossips/evil thoughts harmful to you which first harms the most innocent your child, superstition mostly of course to think so
so i thought what if you try to use those mantras to fight the irrational part, just going to a temple, i'm sure there are Chinese similar practices, but if there are Tibetan temples in your city, so try listening to some chantings and feel calmed, no? it's not important to understand the language
And 141 looks like a genuine attempt at helpfulness, good progress by read.
believe it or not i always mean just to help, i'm sure i would have said the same things in the other thread if the talk were about one's irrational thoughts cz what is religion if not that irrational thoughts
if one is religious could be one's own religion to offer consolation, if atheist you could try the buddhist practices to try to alleviate pain
144: Oh I believe you, it's just this time it also actually looks like you're attempting to help, which (let's face it) hasn't been a strong suit to this point.
if there are no tibetan temples in your place or it's a long distance to go there and somehow inconvenient, i can post just some youtube videos for you, if you are interested, though the actual going thing would work better maybe
when my sister was very sick in the hospital last winter i was using the ones believed to help with healing replaying them whole day, whether it helped her recovery but it helped my anxiety very much
thank you read, I do actually pray about stuff despite being more or less an atheist, which means I'm most of the way converted to buddhism already. nothing's working, and I'm just tripping out, that's why I'm upset. maybe I'll try harder.
Hey al, my thoughts are with you, and I'm rooting (can't think of a better word) for you. Please pretend that this is a thoughtful and articulate comment full of wisdom, because I don't know what to say but want you to know that I want whatever would be just the right thing to be said said.
so these are to remove all obstacles and ward off any evil http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg3xcdVLWDA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQtnk0tr5Wk&feature=related
this one for increasing one's good spirits
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6DSkmWpVGY&feature=related
you can try to play the first three any time you would like to do something for your troubled friend, let him listen too which is better, or just let it play by yourself
the last one is the White Tara prayer, is believed to help with women's well-being, during the difficult birth for example or any other hardship, works sure not only for women to offer blessings
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3Q8QBCPvgI&feature=related
the prayers used for children i talked about, i can't find, it's called suns duudax, shorog erguulex, domnoh, and is usually done in the temples by monks
135: "I am just incapable of applying rational insight to the situation."
There are some recent articles about using CBT to get real live psychotics able to ignore the voices, something thought impossible back when I was thinking about being shrink. There have been some actual advances in the field, much to my surprise.
Given my insistance on making my own decisions about going on or quitting this universe, all I will suggest, contrary to Yoda's dictum, is "try".
135: "I am just incapable of applying rational insight to the situation."
There are some recent articles about using CBT to get real live psychotics able to ignore the voices, something thought impossible back when I was thinking about being shrink. There have been some actual advances in the field, much to my surprise.
Given my insistance on making my own decisions about going on or quitting this universe, all I will suggest, contrary to Yoda's dictum, is "try".
using CBT to get real live psychotics able to ignore the voices
There is a subset of people with psychosis who have voices that try to sell them insurance. This group has been so successful at ignoring the voices most of them are unaware that they are experiencing psychosis. They believe some company paid a bunch of money to put an indignant caveman on every TV show in the U.S.
It's important to googleproof WOFLSON.
ELF SNOBNOW.
And why don't more people use anagrams for googleproofing?
awesome twits sounding like some koans or what
MOUSEOVER
Two things before I have to head out to the dentist. 1) Moby, most of TV causes brain damage IMO. and 2) Al, I wasn't saying I think you're psychotic. I was using that as an example of what are to me is real progress in a field.
Moby, most of TV causes brain damage IMO.
Only the glowing screen on the front and the speaker.
Elf Snobnow is pretty good.
For some reason my name breaks the Anagram Server here: http://wordsmith.org/anagram/
None, apparently.
I "knew" it was a bad idea to do heroin every day; it's not like I'm some kind of total idiot. I just went and did it anyway because, fuck it.
I feel pretty much exactly the same way about having eaten three candy bars this morning.
And I don't mean the fun-sized ones, either.
None, apparently.
Too many consonants.
155: Yes, people tend to OVERUSE OM.
154: Using "Benjamin" instead of "Ben" widens the field, including NINJA WOMB FELONS.
Maybe I can sneak under the troll radar this way.
Absurd vowel-consonant ratio; ridiculous vowel variance quotient
A Malarial Drunken Sex Perk
or
A Mandrake Reexplains Lurk
I seem to have a great many possible options.
I think I like this one best.
170-1: Look at you risking your pseudonymity.
Hrmpf. A comment like that might irk a competent light zebra.
172: Indeed! Now all the world shall know that... Henrietta C. Glimpkortz comments on Unfogged.
176: That was my uncle.
173: It would be interesting if everyone here were to adopt new pseudonyms. Sort of like a masquerade party.
(Is this something that's been discussed or tried before? It sounds somewhat familiar.)
158: I just found out that "Parrot" is an anagram for "Raptor". Not gonna trust those things anymore.
Jam nor rock?
I don't seem to have many good options.
180: On the other hand, "velociparrot" sounds kinda cute.
178: The experiment lasted about two hours and made Ogged say "you are all savages". (The comment thread with that post was relatively tame, but I definitely remember that there were some kind of problems.)
Huh, I thought My Gayer Motel was here for Single-Blind Day.
The real experiment was after the post Cyrus links and did actually last most of a "working" day. The only drama was that someone named "Curses" signed on to the single-blind thread and freaked a bunch of people out by declaring their intention to become a hooker. I've never known whether this was Serious Bidness or a truly masterful troll.
My understanding is that it was serious.
re: 186
Yeah. If I'm remembering that correctly, I remember who that was, too. But that may be from another discussion in which someone was discussing it.
We found out who it was and everything? And I missed it? Drat and double drat.
I will echo a bunch of people in saying, yes, get angry. Don't feel like you have to be angry, more let yourself be angry if you want. I would guess it's down there anyway. Let it out, it'll burn away. You can still have a relationship with your mom.
I have lots of bad relationships, so you can take it from me. Also, terrible stuff, obviously, rendered beautifully.